2021Q1 Reports: ACL 2021

The Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021) will be held in Bangkok, Thailand, August 1-6, 2021. See the conference homepage: https://2021.aclweb.org/.

We have built 18 committees and there are 60 chairs in total. It is really a great set of chairs! Up to now all things on organization of ACL-IJCNLP’2021 have been well processed and everything is going smoothly. The following summarizes the progress in 2021:

We received over 3500 submissions, a new record.

Following advice from last year and referring to other conferences, including COLING’2020 and NAACL’2021, we have built an Ethics Advisory Committee (EAC). The three co-chairs are from Europe, US and Singapore. They are Malvina Nissim from University of Groningen, Xanda Schofield from Harvey Mudd College and Min-Yen Kan from National University of Singapore.

Considering it is not very easy that PC Chairs communicate with authors by using Softconf system (START), we have built a message board in the conference home page. All news, especially those important and emergent news and notices are announced in the message board. In addition, we have built the Social Media Committee. The five Social Media Committee chairs are from North America, Europe and Asia. They help the conference, especially the PC Chairs, distribute news as widely as possible in cooperation with the publicity chair by using Twitter, Facebook, WeChat, Weibo and many other social media platforms.

In good cooperation with NAACL’2021 and EACL’2021, our Workshop Chairs, Kentaro Inui and Michael Strube, have selected 23 workshops, which have been announced on the conference home page.

Also in good cooperation with NAACL’2021 and EACL’2021, our Tutorial Chairs, Min Zhang and David Chiang have selected 6 tutorials, which are shown on the conference home page.

The Demo Chairs, Heng Ji, Jong C. Park and Rui Xia, have announced the demo CFP on the conference home page (and via the ACL mailing list). The submission deadline is March 25, 2021. According to the request from Heng and Jong, I invited Prof. Rui Xia to join the committee.

With the great help of Priscilla Rasmussen and Chris Callison-Burch, the new version of the Sponsorship booklet has been prepared and announced on the conference homepage. In addition, to enhance the local sponsorship committee, two researchers, Jing Li and Zhongyu Wei, have been invited to join the committee.

The SRW chairs did good work under the supervision of four Faculty Advisors. The paper submission deadline for SRW is April 2, 2021.